Our today’s review will be devoted for the first time to two solutions - ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 – based on the same PCB layout. These will be the products from Gigabyte - GV-RX385256H and GV-RX387512H models. We will try to find out what their advantages and drawbacks are compared with the same graphics solutions based on the reference design.

Call of Juarez

None of the cards can provide a playable frame rate in this game at our settings. We can see the senior R670-based models with 512 megabytes of local memory are in the lead at resolutions higher than 1280x1024 pixels. As opposed to them, the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT slows down suddenly at 1600x1200 and higher. This is due to inefficient memory management which is the common problem of all Nvidia solutions. It must have something to do with the memory controller of the G8x/G9x cores.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The GeForce 9600 GT enjoys a big lead over the other cards and allows playing comfortably at resolutions up to 1600x1200 inclusive. The rest of the cards, except for the overclocked Gigabyte GV-RX387512H, can’t ensure the desired minimum of speed even at 1280x1024.